Antisoma Application: A Fully Integrated V-Like Antibodies Platform

Abstract

Antibodies, also called immunoglobulins, are large Y-shaped proteins which are produced and used by the immune system in order to identify and neutralize foreign substances called antigens. The study and research of antibodies is a critical issue in science and has led in remarkable results with medical applications such as diseases diagnosis, therapies and antibodies related drugs. Due to the importance of antibodies, a comprehensive database of full length protein sequences or crystal structures of immunoglobulin (IG) and T cell receptor (TR) V-like protein sequences from human and other vertebrate species has been created. In this article, we study in detail the unique numbering system for immunoglobulins of IMGT, we correlate the database antibody entries and we provide a more in detailed approach into the data. Finally, due to the deviation of the expected from the real data, a user friendly application has been created. This powerful and flexible tool manipulates the antibodies V-like protein sequences with the approach described below and gives the opportunity to the user to extract and study the results and its physicochemical properties. The need for new therapeutic targets and the development of more potent drugs is enormous, despite the efforts and the investments all these years for the development of novel next generation drugs, the discovery and the characterization of new therapeutic targets using immunoglobulins or antibodies. The final outcome from this project will support the development of novel therapies. Antisoma can be freely downloaded from http://www.dimvl.com/antisoma.

Keywords

• antisoma application
• antibodies/immunoglobulins database
• V-like antibodies
• antibodies numbering system
• complementarity-determining regions
• fragment region
• physicochemical properties